The Sound of Silence
by Scribbler
Summary: [one shot] After the Terra Arc, Raven just wants things back to normal. That plan is thrown out of whack, however, by Beast Boy's need to grieve, and a sourceless but familiar voice in her head that she should not be able to hear. Nothing is as it seems.


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**Disclaimer –** The Teen Titans and their world are not mine. Except for the bits that are. Raven, Terra and Beast Boy, however, belong to DC and WB. I didn't even get them for Christmas, and I was good _all_ year!

**A/N –** You know, this started out as something small. I planned for it to be about five-ish pages – seven at a stretch. Boy, I have _really _got to learn to shut up. By the way, those lyrics at the start and end are there for a reason. This is not a songfic, but there were parallels between the events of the fic and the lyrics that even I didn't see until afterwards, so I included them for everyone else to see, too. Dedicated to Orin, who's been having a nasty time at work lately, and whom I know likes a bit of Raven.

**Continuity –** Between the end of Season Two and the beginning of Season Three.

**Feedback – **Fairy dust! Helps me to fly.

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_The Sound of Silence_

© Scribbler, March 2005

* * *

_Hello darkness, my old friend,  
I've come to talk with you again,  
Because a vision softly creeping  
Left its seeds while I was sleeping;  
And the vision that was planted in my brain  
Still remains  
Within the sound of silence. _

In restless dreams I walked alone  
Narrow streets of cobblestone  
'Neath the halo of a street lamp  
I turned my collar to the cold and damp  
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light  
That split the night  
And touched the sound of silence

_**-The Sound of Silence** _by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel

* * *

Silence was a funny thing, Raven reflected. There were times when it was palpable, something you could pick up and sift through your fingers like fine sand. There were warning silences, and the cathartic silence that came at the end of prolonged noise. There were awkward silences and weighty silences, silences that were simply a lack of sound. There was the silence of small creatures, being still, and the silence of big creatures waiting to pounce. Sometimes there was the silence of nobody being there at all. And then there was a very hot, sharp kind of silence made by someone there – watching.

Since as far back as she could remember, Raven had moved through a world awash with the emotions of other people. Meditation was a way for her to achieve silence. She'd been doing it for so long that it was a simple task to close her eyes, focus, and gently tune out everything outside her own head. It wasn't a permanent thing, and sometimes it ended at the most inconvenient moments, but it was better than nothing.

She hovered above her favourite spot on the roof. Sunset stained the sky orange, like a giant patch of rust in indigo paintwork. She wasn't completely oblivious to it, but the pulses on the pads of her thumbs and forefingers were more apparent.

"Raven?"

The words, the slight curiosity in them, was just more _noise_. She heard them, but didn't immediately realise they were for her.

After a moment she opened her eyes. She looked at the darkening sky before the speaker. "Robin."

"I … just wondered if you were okay."

"Have I given you reason to think otherwise?"

"No. But - " He paused. He'd been checking up on them for silly reasons for days. She was expecting his next mealtime excuse to be about the temperature of her tea.

"I was meditating," she said needlessly.

"Yeah. I can see that." He paused again. The nuance of the silence was not lost on her. "Well, if you're sure you're okay, I'll just … I'll go back inside."

"Robin." She turned to look at him properly.

"Yeah?"

_Fear and fire and falling falling falling down down down help me help me I can't do this no no no never never oh God help me help me please - _

"Nothing."

* * *

Making tea was an art form.

Nobody ever seemed to appreciate that.

"Cyborg, if you're going to do that, can you at least wait for me to get from behind the counter first?"

Cyborg looked up, half the fridge door off its hinges. There were Tupperware containers and old takeout boxes on the floor where he'd emptied them. Several were significantly out of date. "Well excuse _me_ if y'all decided you needed that herbal junk while I'm in handyman mode."

Anticlockwise. That was the best way to stir tea. Not even thinking about it, Raven made perfect circles with her spoon. "There was barely a squeak. You didn't need to fix it."

"You say tomato, I say toh-mah-toh."

"Whatever." She rolled her eyes and took a sip.

_I don't like tea awful stuff why would you drink tea anyway soda's better orange soda or even cola but not that weird decaffeinated stuff you need a buzz and buzzy buzzy buzz buzz like a little bee flying around the flowers –_

It burned all the way down.

* * *

The earthquakes had ruined the foundations of so many buildings in Jump City that insurance brokers were going into conniptions about all the payouts. Those nearest Slade's sunken 'church' were the worst hit. The emergency services had cordoned off most of the area, and only the foolish went back to their homes to fetch their belongings. Compounds had sprung up all over the place, so they had somewhere to stay while waiting to see what would happen.

It made sense Mammoth would try to hide out on the other side of the cordon, in amongst the ruins. The dumb lummox.

Raven ducked behind a caved-in building, noting with some detached part of her brain that it had recently been a house. The roof was gone, and most of the walls, but a row of ash-coated stuffed animals stared dispassionately up at her with dead button eyes.

She sensed Starfire overhead, Robin in her grasp. Cyborg was a full block away, while Beast Boy scouted the perimeter in case Mammoth tried to make a break for it.

They weren't entirely sure whether he'd ever left Jump when everyone else did. Not knowing a great deal about HIVE in general, there was every possibility its members had stuck around in some secret bunker to wait out the crisis. Raven wondered if they should devote more time to investigating HIVE when things were a little more secure.

She caught a fleeting thought and seized upon it. "I got him," she said into her communicator. "He's heading north."

"Follow him," Robin replied. "We'll head that way and tackle him if we see him first."

"Roger that."

In the end, Mammoth went down without much hassle. He was confused about the lack of available hostages, and when he tried to collapse a wall on Raven and it fell on him instead, he was puzzled just long enough for her to toss the equivalent of a mental grenade into his head. It was only a small one, but it laid him out long enough for Robin to arrive and produce some metahuman-strength handcuffs.

They handed him over to police and went home to debrief and discuss the tiny latent tracking device Robin had attached under the skin on the back of his neck. He escaped the next day, but didn't appear on police radar again, so the Titans never heard about how he maimed three officers while waiting for a pitifully feeble armoured truck to arrive.

* * *

"Raven?"

She sighed. "What is it, Star?"

Starfire stayed in the doorway, apparently nervous about coming any further into the room. "I … I wished to enquire as to your … well-being."

"Did Robin send you?"

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing. I'm fine, Star."

"Oh. I am pleased that you are fine."

"Whatever. Was there anything else?"

"Would … would you like to partake of some sweetened cocoa blocks with me?"

"You mean chocolate."

"Is that the name of this confectionary?" She held up the large bar, silver paper glinting in the light of from the corridor. Of course, Raven's lights were off, so the only illumination came from outside her room.

"You know it is. Just like you knew every other time we told you." For some unfathomable reason, Starfire could absorb complicated battle tactics in seconds, but consistently failed to remember the name for chocolate. Some found it endearing. Raven just found it profoundly irritating.

"Oh. Of course. You are correct." Star smiled in the brightly forced way that wasn't really all that cheerful. "Would you care to join me for a glot or two?"

I like chocolate I do especially milk white's okay I guess but not black yuk it's too bitter like mothballs when you shake out an old jacket without closing your mouth first – 

"Not tonight, Starfire."

"Oh." Her smile slipped a notch. "Well then, perhaps you have seen Beast Boy recently? The bright paper of this 'chocolate' declares it fit for vegetarians. Maybe he would like to share it with me."

_Beast Boy Beast Boy wait don't leave me come back please I'm so scared I know I'm have to do this but God oh God I'm scared and I don't want to it's so hot my skins all burny please come back come back don't leave me alone here please - _

Raven blinked slowly. Her pulse beat rapidly in her thumbs and forefingers. "I don't know where he is. Now please leave me alone."

Starfire looked startled at the sharpness in her voice, but nodded and left.

Raven chanted and rose off the bed in a lotus position.

* * *

"Something's wrong, and I want you to tell me what." Robin was using his Leader Voice. It sounded awfully close to Batman's voice.

Raven had met Batman only once, when the Justice League came to Jump City. He was full of shadows, his mind outlaid with signposts that said nobody was to try and see what lay inside them. She thought Batman a man on a path to self-destruction, but kept it to herself.

"Nothing's wrong with me," she replied, slicing an apple onto a saucer, since she couldn't find a clean plate.

"Don't give me that. You've been really off lately, and I'm willing to bet you know why, too."

"How much?"

"What?"

"You said you're willing to bet. How much?"

He frowned. "Stop stalling - "

"Did it ever occur to you that I'm just dealing?"

"Excuse me?"

"Dealing. It's what you do after a crisis. You get up and deal with it."

That made him falter, but only for a fraction of a second. "With obsessive meditation? Raven, we barely even see you anymore. You only come out of your room for food and missions. You're giving new meaning to the word 'overkill'."

"If you have a problem with how I spend my time, then write me a letter." She turned, telekinetically whisking the door of the dishwasher open to plonk her knife in the cutlery tray. "Otherwise, please let me pass. I have a book to get back to."

Robin narrowed his gaze.

She met it without flinching.

"You can't fool me, Raven," he said softly. "I know you're hiding something."

"I'm hiding a lot, but not what you're talking about. Please move out of my way."

He didn't so much as twitch aside. "This affected us all, Raven. There's no need to lock yourself away. You don't _have _to be alone to deal with every bad thing that ever happens."

Her frown deepened. "When I need a psychotherapist, I'll be sure to call you."

* * *

None of them could quite trust themselves anymore. It wasn't a spoken thing, jut an undercurrent of speculation. If one of them could go bad, why not another? Why not all of them? What was to stop them, really, from crossing over and becoming the villains, the criminals, the rogues? They all had the potential to go bad. Some of them had even proved it before.

Of course, this was pushed aside by bright and sparkly promises. They were the good guys. They were the heroes. True blue. One hundred percent defenders of the innocent.

Raven concentrated on the pulse in her forefingers and thumbs and fine-tuned her empathy to keep her uncertainties at bay.

_I could've been good I could I wanted to and I was at the end I was you saw me I saved you I saved you all –_

Starfire and Robin had fallen asleep on the couch. She was nestled against him, pressed so close it was difficult to tell she was the taller one. His neck was bent back, head resting on a cushion and hands draped with palms open. He wasn't wearing his gloves.

Raven watched them, still even by the measure of her tremendous self-control.

She didn't understand, but she envied. She envied the simple strength of simple people. Though she could comprehend the _idea _of drawing solace from another, she couldn't fully _understand _it. She'd been alone too long, quiet and dark and brooding. While she could reach out to others, could depend on them in a fight and trust them not to let her down on the battlefield, she couldn't take pleasure in the simple act of falling asleep on someone's shoulder.

_His shoulder smells kind of musty guess he kept the stink from when he went rat I've snotted all over it now can't cry don't cry got to be strong yeah chin up stiff upper lip and all that stuff – _

Raven considered tossing a blanket over them to keep them warm, but reasoned it would likely wake Robin up. Inaudibly, she phased away through the floor.

She wasn't even thinking about where she was going. She'd meant to go back to her room, but the salty tang of seawater hit her in the face as soon as she emerged. The rocks on the far side of the tower were slippy with seaweed and spray. Rather than try her luck at balancing on them, Raven floated above, cloak wrapped tight around her body to keep her dry.

The sky was clear and the moon was fat, throwing out bright silver light that lit up the bay like one of those postcards tourists sent home. It was pretty, in a hackneyed kind of way. The moon had been there before humanity crawled out of the sludge and pulled itself upright. It had watched as they grew, as they spread, as they sprawled their bloodlines across the planet and flung ever more sophisticated weapons at each other. The first mud ball, the first stick used to poke; the first stone that cracked a skull, all the way through to guns and H-bombs, cruise missiles and germ warfare. The moon had seen it all, but could be reduced to a background feature on a twenty-five-cent postcard to Wisconsin.

Raven stared at it. Then she drew herself up, shaped her hands, and began to chant.

* * *

It was raining; a heavy, torrential rain that hit like a handful of pebbles every time the wind blew in the right direction. The windows in Titans Tower were built to withstand a metahuman frontal assault, so they were in no danger of rattling, but the whole gothic mood of the storm made it feel as though they should be.

Beast Boy was a tiny lump in the middle of the sofa. There was a video game asking him to press start, but the controller was on the floor.

Raven felt the walls around his mind before she felt _him_. They were an unconscious defence, but strong, like a shield of solid rock. She could see six feet of granite in her mind. The base was crumbling. It would have been easy to topple, but she refrained. Instead, she ducked backwards out of the door without her tea.

A journalist came by to grab a couple of quotes and a photo or two for a magazine follow-up to the 'Jump Crisis, as it was being called. She was attractive, in a way that had nothing to do with the person underneath and everything to do with the gloss on the top. She spoke seriously, but her voice was high and grating, and the nails that were visible through her open-toe shoes were bottle green.

Naturally, Cyborg talked to her. Despite the irony, he was the public face of the team, the one least likely to mess up and say the wrong thing. Beast Boy made too many jokes, Raven just didn't like talking to reporters, Robin was so intense he had a tendency to unnerve them so much they put a whole different slant on the article, and Starfire was … well, she was Starfire.

Raven stayed in her room, meditating until the woman was gone. She stayed put for three-quarters of an hour after that, too, then grabbed a book to tuck under her arm and phased into the kitchen –

Where Cyborg was just helping the reporter to her feet.

"Ah. Raven," he said in a voice that clearly wasn't sure what to make of her sudden appearance.

The reporter's eyes shone. "Hey, d'ya think I could get an interview with _you_?" she asked without preamble. "I'm Vicki Valentine, of Jump Jabberer. It's be really cool if you could say a few words on the whole," she made air-quotes with her fingers, "teammate gone bad thing. Cy here is a great guy and all, but his patter's too polished. Lacks that spontaneous quality, y'know?"

"Hey!" Cyborg couldn't stop himself.

She canted her head to one side, slid an index finger down his chest-plate and smiled winsomely. "I think you've been doing this too long, buddy. You know the drill too well. But _nobody's _got a Raven-eye-view yet. And what with that whole 'Raven versus Terra' thing going on when she was on your side, it'd be golden to get that kind of post-fallout perspective. Absolutely golden. So how about it?" She turned the smile on Raven and pulled a pen from behind her ear.

"Get out of our home before I drop a mass of boiling water on your head."

She looked startled, but undeterred, and actually wagged a finger at Raven. "Now, now, I've been warned about what a prickly pear you are. But I'm warning _you_, I'm not leaving without an interview."

The switch on the kettle glowed black and flipped on. The water must have already been warm – Cy must have made her a drink to be friendly – because wisps of steam started rising from the spout less than a minute later.

"You've had your interview," Raven said quietly. "Now leave."

Behind Vicki Valentine, Cyborg made cutting motions across his throat. Their public image had been damaged when Terra went bad – which, for an officially permitted superteam, was a Very Bad Thing. Only by indulging the press had they managed to claw back their reputation, and they were slowly winning back the confidence of those they were supposed to protect. For all their great previous track record, they were still five extraordinarily powerful teenagers living in a giant, extraordinarily powerful T. At the start, there had been a very real danger of City Hall asking them to leave, dismantle the Tower and erase all trace of themselves from Jump.

For her part, Vicki Valentine started to look a little unsettled. "You know, this kind of treatment wouldn't go over well in my article."

Cyborg's cutting motions became more frantic.

Raven narrowed her eyes. She could feel the familiar swell of her power trying to make them blaze at the implied threat.

_Why won't you let me talk to the reporters am I not pretty enough is that it or is it because I'm the newbie that's it right isn't it I'm the newbie so I might say something dumb that gets splashed across all the society pages – _

"Azarath, metrion, zinthos," she murmured quietly. "Azarath, metrion, zinthos. Azarath, metrion, zinthos." When she felt suitably calmed, she looked straight at Vicki Valentine and said, "My statement on the whole issue is that we're only human. Or as human as we can be. We have special powers that let us protect people like you, and we have experience enough that our judgment in combat is superior to the average civilian. But we're still human."

"So you're saying you're better than the rest of us?" Vicki scribbled on her notepad. "Is that it?"

"No. We're not better, and we're not worse. Neither was Terra."

"But she helped a megalomaniac empty the city of people in a reign of fear and violence. She didn't even spare the hospitals. Do you know how many patients are in a critical condition right now because she and this Slade character forced them out of their beds? The lucky ones went to wards in Calliope City and Steel City, but the unlucky camped out in ambulances. Hardly the best medical treatment for their money, is it?"

"Have their been any deaths?"

"Well … no. Not as a direct consequence. But that's only thanks to the excellent staff of Jump, Steel and Calliope Generals."

"Then maybe you should be basing your hero article on them." With that, Raven turned and walked through the wall.

She tried to meditate in her room, but her mind kept straying back to the kitchen, the corridor, and the main entrance, where Cyborg was showing Vicki Valentine out. When he'd seen her across the bay, he came up to Raven's room and knocked on the door.

"It's open."

"Okay," he said without greeting, "_what _was all that about?"

"Nothing."

"Don't try that on me, girl. I know what I saw back there was bogus. You know how important these press things are. Why go all psycho on Miss Valentine?"

"I just don't like people getting in my face like that."

"Like what? _I've _been in your face worse than she was. You gonna start beating on me, too?"

"I wasn't beating on her. I just asked her to leave."

He snorted and folded his arms. "Yeah. Great public relations, there."

Raven's hair started to fan around her head, despite there being no breeze. "Look, I never asked for her to speak to me. I didn't even realise she was still _here_, otherwise there's no _way _I would have gone anywhere near her."

"So why didn't you?"

"What?"

"Why didn't you know she was still here? Come on, Raven. With your powers, you could locate a foreign mind at a hundred metres. You've done it before – I've seen it. We were one floor below you."

"I …" She looked down, blinking. "I don't know. I must have been meditating too much. Blocked out everything but my own thoughts. It's not the most exact of silences, you know."

"Don't you mean sciences?"

"Excuse me?"

"You said silences. 'Not the most exact of silences'. You meant sciences, right?"

She didn't answer for a moment. "Yes. Sciences. That's what I meant."

* * *

Beast Boy was not the same.

None of them were, but his differences were the easiest to see. He was possessed of a new, furtive suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the slight puffiness beneath his eyes – which may have been from crying, or lack of sleep, or both – and the way he would sometimes stop mid-step, look down and shake his head, as though disagreeing with the world.

They had all been expecting him to mourn, though none of them had so much as spoken the word. Saying 'mourn' made it feel like Terra really had died, and they still liked to fool themselves that they could reverse her condition someday. That sweeping pledge was likely what was keeping Beast Boy going. He had never stopped believing in Terra, though she had hurt him enough that he'd all but convinced himself he hated her. Then, just as he regained the version of her he cared for, she was snatched away again, and he was left with nothing but an embrace of air and an unfeeling statue to mock what might have been.

Grief made him wander. Raven heard Robin, Cyborg and Starfire talking about it, though never together, only in dribs and drabs – one-on-one conversations and too-loud thoughts. Sometimes they included her, or tried to, but she never liked to get involved with those discussions. Reports were logged of Beast Boy walking aimlessly through the furthest parts of the city, or from end to end of the halogen-lit mall, with its timid foundations and hot-dogs impaled beneath heat lamps.

Several times he disappeared for whole days, returning without explanation, but always before the sun set, as if he were afraid of what the night would send after him if he stayed away from the safety of the Tower after dark. Once, he came back with a black eye and dozens of cuts and bruises. He refused to say where he got them, and though she knew she should, Raven could not bring herself to follow him up to his room with an offer of healing. The image of him limping up the stairs, head down and eyes fixed on his feet, oblivious she was even there, seared itself onto the insides of her eyelids as she fled back to her own ill-lit sanctum.

* * *

The sun would not be up for hours, but the faint red glow of false dawn was already painting the sky at the farthest edge of the sea. Raven kept her hood up, as she stepped from her portal onto a patch of uneven ground between an apartment block and the old cinema. There were plans to rebuild the multiplex on the other side of town, as far from this spot as you could get while still in city limits.

The letters on top of the cinema were skewed, as if the building had had a seizure. They spelled out 'TH INCRDIBES' in tall white font, advertising a film where the heroes won, the world was full of bright colours, and nobody but the bad guy paid a price.

_I did this really I really did this this isn't pretty anymore this isn't my baby – _

She walked instead of floated, jumping every so often to avoid exposed pipes and electricity cables that jutted through the concrete like teeth. When she reached the epicentre, marked by a large hole in the ground, she stopped.

_Don't make me go down there please don't show me don't make me go I don't want to not again please please please –_

She took a step.

_Please please please –_

She took another.

_PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE – _

She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. Then she sank into the floor and reappeared in her room back at the tower, where nobody had even been aware she was gone.

* * *

"I'm worried about Beast Boy," Robin said.

Raven paused outside the door to the evidence room, listening despite herself.

"He _says_ he's okay," Cyborg replied, sounding not at all convinced.

"He hasn't eaten anything since yesterday morning, and he hasn't been sleeping. I'd suggest some kind of pills, but I don't know how they'd react with his system."

"I could always bop him on the head. That usually works."

Robin grunted.

"Okay, bad joke."

"I don't want him sinking into some kind of depression."

"Li'l late for that, Rob."

Another grunt.

"You want I should go talk to him?"

"You sure you'd want to?"

"Hey, it's not like he ain't ever been in a funk before. Remember when she left the first time?"

"Yeah, I remember."

_You told him you lied to me you **lied** –_

"I also remember how he reacted when we first learned she'd been working for Slade," Robin added. "I'd always pegged Beast Boy as the easiest to predict of all of us. You always knew how he was going to respond to a situation. But that … Star waited outside his door for almost seven hours with a bowl of food, and he walked right past her when he finally opened the door. Seven hours, and not one glance."

"I know." Cyborg sighed. "And that was when Terra was still - " He couldn't finish the sentence, whether because he couldn't say the word, or because he couldn't reconcile it as accurate enough. "Before she was like she is now," he compromised. "When she was still … around."

Robin grunted. Raven felt something in him spike, and pulled her hood up in a longstanding habit. There was no danger, nothing to hide _from,_ but her hood was a barrier most people respected.

_Why do you wear that dumb hood indoors are you hiding from something or do you just not like the world seeing your face hey why're you walking away from me was it something I said hey Raven come back and answer me did I offend you or something c'mon I didn't mean it jeez what a grouch –_

"Talk to him, if you can. We all need to deal with this."

"Including you, man."

Another grunt. Another spike.

"Excuse me. I've got work to do."

She felt Cyborg move towards the door. She was gone before he passed through it.

* * *

Raven was trying to sleep with her back pressed against a bank of pillows, since laying horizontal refused to reap results. She didn't look at all like a person at rest. Her face was pinched, there were dark circles around her eyes, and her lips were pursed. She slept like it was a painful process.

She had opened her window because her room was so stuffy. The waves from the bay sounded like a heartbeat.

She hadn't been there when Terra fell. She hadn't seen the moment flesh atrophied and turned to the stone she once commanded. She'd gone back afterwards, yes, but by then everything had cooled. There was no panic, no passion, no furore in granite.

Putting a plaque there hadn't been her idea, nor could she truly appreciate the gesture. The statue in Slade's 'church' wasn't Terra. It didn't feel like Terra. It had no mind, no thoughts, and no emotions. Commemorating it was like presenting a bouquet to a corpse – it didn't affect anything except the giver's conscience.

So why couldn't she get the damn thing out of her head?

She opened her eyes, staring across the room to the billowing curtains. In this kind of flat nighttime silence she could feel her pulse echoing inside her head. It was even and slow and steady.

And she stayed that way until she watched the sun rise.

* * *

He wasn't there - and then suddenly he was. The morose young man in black, hair with the hastily sawn look of necessity and no barber. He froze like a mouse that had just heard the pad of an approaching cat.

"You're not supposed to be here." Raven emerged from the shadows in a way she knew looked creepy, but which she couldn't help. "This place isn't safe."

The young man turned to look at her, and immediately his posture slackened, though his eyes remained guarded. Obviously he'd been expecting someone more threatening than a Teen Titan.

For a second Raven wondered why on earth he was more afraid of petty thugs than of _her_.

"So what if it is?" he challenged. "Not against the law, is it?"

"Depends what you're up to."

"Nuthin'."

"I know you're lying."

He took a step backwards. "You're the broad who can read minds, ain'tcha?"

She chose not to answer.

"I ain't … I was just passin' through. No harm done. See?" He gestured wildly. The move dislodged a brown paper bag from his inside vest pocket. "Fuck - " He made a grab for it, but Raven's telekinesis snatched it out of his grasp. "Hey! You can't do that! That's private property, that is!"

"Why do I get the feeling this isn't the lunch your mother packed for you?" She let it hover above her outstretched hand.

He glared at her, but there was apprehension around his head. And guilt. It looked like little blue snakes weaving in and out of his ears. Like most of the general population, he'd had no training in how to shield his thoughts. Polythene bags full of white powder shot into the ether.

Raven narrowed her eyes. "Tell me what's in it. Now."

"Fuck you."

"I already know."

"Yeah, right."

"You think very loud."

A stab of fear. A bead of sweat ran uncomfortably between his shoulder blades. He wanted to scratch the spot, but he was afraid that if he moved she'd blast him.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

He snorted, but the guilt and fear poured off him. He'd never taken anything stronger than an aspirin in his life, but he was fully aware of what could happen to those who ended up with what she now had in her possession.

Raven saw a wheelchair and an old woman with a chignon and the palest blue eyes she'd ever seen.

"Does your mother know you do this?"

"What do _you_ know about my mother?"

She released her telekinesis. The brown paper bag fell into her hand. "I know that she wouldn't want you doing _this_ when you don't really need to. The money's good enough to cancel out the risks. Or at least you think so. You don't like relying on the payments your father sends through." She snorted. "Big deal. A lot of people have cruddy fathers. Running's small. You're no pusher. You don't even carry a piece. I won't make you promise not to do this again, but remember this much: if you ever so much as _think_ of picking up another of these 'deliveries' to supplement yourself, all your nightmares combined won't match what happens when I find you."

His throat bobbed, but he nodded. His fear was almost overpowering. Maybe she was coming off a bit strong, but she'd learned several lessons about not catching things while they were small. All things. Today's runner was tomorrow's pusher, and how many high and dead junkies in the morning.

"Go. There's a coffee house on Ashcroft Avenue that needs someone to work the till. Frenelli's. If you need money that badly, then get a comb, go to them and ask for an interview."

"Lemme guess: if I don't you'll know about it?"

"They make the best mochaccino in Jump."

Another swallow. Another nod. He shifted his weight onto his back foot and she closed her eyes in a long, obliging blink. When she looked again he was scrabbling away over the debris and broken seats of the abandoned cinema.

She sighed.

When she emerged the young man was long gone. She hoped he did what she'd said.

She cast a long look in the direction of the epicentre-hole and sighed again. "Distractions," she muttered, teleporting to the police station to hand in what she'd 'found'.

After giving a statement, she reported back to the Tower with the information on the drug ring she'd harvested from the young man's mind. Two days later, the ring was nothing more than a bad memory and a puzzling shipment that was never picked up from the docks.

* * *

'She walks in beauty, like the night'. That's what the coffee-shoppe poets who were up all hours had quoted when she first appeared, among them but always so alone. She walked the night, and it was her realm. There were dark shadows and pinpricks of humanity in the night. It was a quiet, heady world of moonshine and secrets that the sun never saw.

She quickly established a ritual, though not one that could be deciphered and used against her. She went wherever the night wind took her, from the bowling alleys and all-night arcades to ghetto street-corners and urine-stained bus terminuses. Sometimes she floated for hours outside the windows of the shelters for those whose homes still hadn't been reimbursed after the crisis. Once or twice she moored herself near the bridge and the wretched thoughts of those camped beneath it. Then she waited out the night in a 24-hour Starbucks that was the only place open, swallowing lukewarm coffee that had been hot when she first grasped the cup. Sometimes she brought leaflets for shelters and soup kitchens to read, working out where things were so she knew approximately where the wind was taking her. These ended up stuffed into judicious places the night after, or pushed by unseen forces into the hands of those who needed their information.

When the dawn arrived to swallow the shadows, she faded with them.

It was easier than sleeping.

* * *

"Raven."

"What?" Why did Robin always approach her when she was slicing apples? Was there some special apple-related signal she was unaware of?

"Are you feeling okay?"

"Please don't tell me you're starting with that again."

"I'm just concerned, that's all. You don't look like you've been getting enough rest lately."

"Are you planning to try filling _me _full of pills, too?" The words were out before she could stop them. She paused mid-slice. That had never happened before.

Robin was confused, then surprised, then a mosaic of emotions that included both guilt and a little indignation. "I wouldn't do that to you."

"There's no point, anyway. My system would probably reject them. It doesn't take well to Western medicine."

He made an indeterminate noise. "Are you … are you sure you're - "

"I'm _fine_." She set the knife down and picked up her plate with only half the apple sliced. "Peachy keen."

_That _got a peculiar look. "'Peachy keen'?"

"I'm expanding my vocabulary."

"By going to dives at three in the morning?"

She stopped, facing away from him. She supposed this was the point she was meant to experience the same gamut of emotions he just had, but she didn't. The only reason she was getting the apple was because she'd been meditating so hard and so long she'd missed lunch. Her mind was almost – _almost_ – serene.

"Apparently I'm not the only one who's been hearing what wasn't meant for her."

"Do you want to talk to a counsellor, or someone?" He said the words like they tasted bad on his tongue. "The bigger superteams – if something traumatic enough happens – they … talk to people. People outside. Not teammates, I mean. Someone with a fresh perspective on things, who's unbiased."

She couldn't help a disbelieving noise infecting the back of her throat. "I'll bet whoever sets up a clinic like that in Gotham makes a packet." She blinked. Again, that had slipped out with her meaning it to.

Robin blanched, but only in his head. "I just want to make sure you're okay, Raven."

"The thing is, Robin," she sighed, teleporting away, "your definition of 'okay' and mine are two different beasts."

* * *

She sat on the bridge, above water made murky with the sludge of industry, and watched the sun begin to rise. Usually she made it her habit to be back in her room by now, but her conversation with Robin had made her feel rebellious. Her life was _her _life. She wasn't under contract. He was leader because he had the best tactical mind of all of them, but her life was still her life.

For now.

_My dad wasn't supposed to be my dad he was a king and married and my mom well she wasn't an aristocrat **or **his wife but he kept us nice in an out of the way place we had to move to America when I was really small but my mom said he was real nice and he even set up a trust fund for me though I can't touch it until I'm twenty-one I'm not going to see twenty-one am I I'm going to be fifteen forever – _

She tried to meditate, to calm her mind ready to go back and face another day of being a superhero.

_I'm scared – _

Azarath metrion zinthos. Azarath metrion zinthos. Azarath metrion zinthos.

_I think I want my mom and my daddy – _

Squeezed into a spot where girder met pylon, Raven drew her knees up to her chest and pressed her face against them.

* * *

It'll be the last thing you ever do.

That was the last thing she'd said to Terra. When the Titans broke into Slade's 'church' to find her menacing a trapped Beast Boy, Raven had got behind her and made a threat she was fully ready to carry out. Terra had hurt them all – tried to kill them more than once. She had betrayed them, betrayed their friendship and their home – the home they had freely offered her on no more than a promise and a show of goodwill.

And then Terra had gone and sacrificed herself to save them. She had turned on Slade just as she'd turned on them, and insisted they leave her behind in a grotto of fire and boiling lava.

It'll be the last thing you ever do.

She'd been willing to smash Terra – more willing than she had ever been. The raw violence inside her had been irresistible, almost overwhelming, like a sibilant whisper right inside her soul. Afterwards she'd been forced to wonder whether she'd actually _wanted _to kill Terra, or whether she'd been pushed in that direction by subtler forces while anger clouded her self-control.

It'll be the last thing you ever do.

She hadn't meant it to be so … literal.

* * *

Robin was in her room when she got back.

She glowered at him, hood up and what little face was showing full of fury. She hadn't given him permission to be in there. "You're in my room."

He nodded. He was sat in the middle of her bed, hands in his lap – no gloves again. The lights were out, and in the dim light of a torch he'd brought with him she could see several old scars on his skin. The most prominent was a burn right across his left palm where he'd obviously gripped something hot. He had to have made it before the Titans, because when she healed injuries it was as if they'd never been.

"Why are you in my room?"

"Because I wanted to make sure you got back okay." He got up and walked to the door, apparently satisfied. "Killer Moth broke out of his containment facility tonight. You didn't take your communicator with you. Don't worry, we took care of it."

Her eyes ticked to the yellow disc on her bedside table. "Robin," she said suddenly, turning to him. "Robin, I…"

He paused, looking back at her. The air was thick with expectancy.

"I just …" She copped out at the last second. "I just needed some time to myself."

With the mask on she couldn't tell if he was blinking or not. "Your time's your own if you need it to be, Raven."

She waited until the silence stretched enough for him to leave, and then sighed.

"Want to bet?"

* * *

She didn't sleep much, but she dozed. Not over her books – never over her books – but often over food. She could be chewing a piece of fruit, contemplating buttering some bread, and suddenly she was blinking back to consciousness and the fruit was brown, the bread slightly stale and the butter soft.

This time it was the smell of waffles that summoned her back. She lifted her head off the counter and gazed at Cyborg's back. He was wearing a ridiculous pink apron, the straps tied into bows around his neck and waist. When he turned around she read the words 'Kiss the Cook' across his breastplate.

"Mornin'."

She glanced at the clock on the wall. "It's two in the afternoon."

"I was being sarcastic, but apparently you've decided to go literal on me." He shrugged and plopped a freshly made waffle onto the plate in front of her. There hadn't been a plate there when she was pondering her lunch. She must have dozed longer than she usually did.

"What's this?"

"Waffley goodness, that's what. Waffles, waffles, and more waffles. Best waffles this side of Gotham, too. Yup, waffles the way my grandma used to make 'em. Mmm-mmm." He took an appreciative bite of his own.

She looked at him askance and asked, "Do you have a waffle fetish?"

He nearly choked. "Excuse me?"

"Never mind."

Coughing, he reached for a glass of grapefruit juice. After a few glugs he drew a hand across his mouth, sighed and leaned on the counter in front of her. "My cookin' really that bad?"

"Hm? Oh. No. It's fine." She took a bite of her waffle to show willing. "Very nice."

"A compliment. Well how-dee-doo."

She ate the rest without speaking. It felt good to have something in her stomach – even if that something was a mass of sugar and batter with little actual nutritional value. When she was done she tore off a piece of kitchen roll and levitated it across to wipe her fingers with.

"Very nice," she said again.

"Want another?"

Her stomach protested. "I think I'll just have some herbal tea."

"Suit yourself." He flipped the switch on the kettle and turned back to the waffle iron in one fluid movement. He whistled the same four bars of the chorus to 'Night Fever' while he poured out batter and waited for it to cook. They'd never got around to replacing the radio that used to sit on the counter in here. One of the Sladebots smashed it, so he made his own music.

_Cy makes the best waffles even though BB doesn't like them but that's because he has to make them himself because Cy doesn't 'do' vegetarian food but I like his waffles mmm-mmm waffles he's a waffle fiend and when he dances to the tunes he's a disco waffle fiend– _

"… Disco waffle fiend …"

"What?" Cyborg turned. "What did you say?"

"Nothing."

"You did. You called me 'disco waffle fiend'." He looked closely at her and then lowered his gaze. "Terra used to call me that."

"Terra said a lot of things," Raven replied, getting to her feet.

"Hey, wait. Your tea - "

She didn't even slow down. "I've lost the taste for it."

* * *

Nobody had touched Terra's room. In an act of supreme irony, when Slade's bots attacked the Tower they had left her room alone. When news of her deception reached the Titans they checked it for bugs, then cut power to the motion sensor that operated the door and left everything be.

Inside it was like stepping back in time. A thin layer of dust was all that said it wasn't months ago, and Terra _wasn't _about to walk in with a towel-turban around her head and ask what the 411 was. She never got possessive about her room, never protested about people being in there without her. There was yet more irony to that openness.

_Oh guys you didn't have to do this for me wow my own room already and you decorated it and everything jeez you guys really are the best –_

Raven floated in the very centre of the room, the portal she had opened on the ceiling still there, like an escape route. Which was ridiculous, because she'd been present when Robin and Cyborg searched it. The three most logical minds together. There was nothing and nobody dangerous in here.

She glanced at the sideboard, stacked with its array of framed photographs and novelty pencils, and the stuffed animal collection on the bed. Terra had changed the sheets the day she left. She never even slept in the fresh ones. She always told everyone she hated washing bedclothes, but she'd still made everything fresh and clean the day she was planning to leave the Titans for good. There was a rough indentation in the very centre of the duvet; about the size and shape a small dog or housecat would leave. Next to it sat a heart-shaped jewellery box, shut tight and abandoned there.

_Oh Beast Boy I don't know what to say – _

Raven looked away from the box, to the pencil collection. Terra always had a thing for the kind of pencils tourists buy as gifts for people back home. There was one with a cartoon alligator at the top, another covered in googly eyes, one so long you had to lean it over your shoulder to write, and another with a huge ball of pink fluff on the end. There were more in the pencil cases, but these four caught her attention. She floated over and picked them up, turning them over in her hands and putting them down again. It was as if she hoped touching these personal items would help her understand the contradictory girl who had blown into their lives and then blown out like a snuffed candle.

Terra had lived according to other people. She had tried to live the way others did – you got powers, you became a superhero. Then, when that didn't work, she had gone the other direction – you got powers, you became a supervillain. She had never lived according to herself and her own expectations. Even her end had been for someone else – to save the Titans and the empty houses of Jump City's refugees. In her time on Earth she had been capable of so much, yet accomplished relatively little.

It all seemed rather pointless, really.

Raven put down the fluffy pencil and sat on the bed. Outside, the sun shone brilliantly, but her eyelids pulled to shut themselves. Her head started to lean forward onto her chest.

_I can't believe it they actually trust me –_

Her eyes snapped open. Shaking herself, she bolted to her feet and out through the portal like she was being chased. In the backdraft the alligator pencil rolled off the sideboard and clinked to the floor, breaking all the lead inside.

* * *

There was a familiar face behind the counter at Frenelli's. The haircut was better, the feel of the mind more relaxed, but it was the same boy Raven had caught running drugs through the cordoned off area by Slade's 'church'.

He waved goodbye to a customer and then looked to the next person in line. His mood darkened when he saw her, but there were no little blue worms in his ears this time. Raven stepped up to the counter and ordered a mochaccino.

"Here you go, Psychic-Girl," he said, bringing it to her table a few minutes later.

She looked up at him, one eyebrow raised while the other attempted to burrow into her eyeball. Her hood was up, so the effect was entirely lost on him.

"That's not my name."

He shrugged. "Can I interest you in a biscotti?" he said in the manner of one who has said the same line several hundred times before.

"What's _your _name?"

He blinked. "You tell me."

She just stared at him. She'd perfected a stare that didn't need a mask to be daunting.

He scratched at the back of his neck, caught himself doing it and lowered his arm. His hands were scrubbed clean, the healthy pink fingernails cut short. "My name's Daniel," he said in a voice that was sullen in a not-really kind of way.

Slowly, she nodded and lowered her hood. "Raven."

"Pfft. Like I didn't know that already?" He kept one eye on his co-worker – a college age girl with a chestnut ponytail that stuck out the back of her baseball cap. "You're famous, dude."

"So you know not to call me 'Psychic-Girl' next time."

He looked at her, then shrugged again and muttered, "Whatever."

A few minutes after he'd scuttled away, the college girl came over. There were freckles up and down her nose, and she had the wholesome, tanned complexion of one who spent a lot of time outdoors. It was a striking contrast to the other boy's pale skin and dark hair.

"Sorry about him," she said. "He's kind of new. He wasn't rude to you, was he?"

Raven shook her head. "No."

"Good. Hey, you're that Raven chick from the Teen Titans, right?"

She nodded.

"Cool. You want a biscotti? Or a pastry? It's on the house. The coffee, too."

Suspicion – her natural fallback. "Why are you giving me freebies?"

"Because you guys saved us from that psycho and his little rock-maiden. My grandma lives here in Jump. I'm just taking a year out of my course to take care of her after all this. If it weren't for you guys, she might not even be here anymore."

Raven stared into her cup for a long moment. "I'll take the biscotti."

"Righty tighty." The girl turned to go.

"And her name was Terra."

The girl paused, shot Raven a curious look, and then went behind the counter. She said something to the pale boy, who shrugged and busied himself replacing the used filter in the decanter. He dumped the old sodden coffee grounds in the trash with no more care or regard than they deserved.

Raven sipped quietly and stared out of the window, watching the world go by.

* * *

"Raven." Someone said her name and gently nudged her shoulder. "Raven."

Raven snorted indelicately and opened her eyes. She was slumped sideways on the couch, a plate of orange segments sprawled beside her. "Mmf. Starfire?"

"You were asleep." Starfire smiled gently and helped her upright, then sat beside her.

Raven scrubbed at her face and picked a piece of orange peel from her hair. "I must've dozed off."

"Yes."

"Starfire?"

"Yes?"

"How long were you standing there?"

Star looked a little guilty. "I believe the term is 'long enough'. You seemed very tired. It did not seem right to awaken you until you appeared in danger of falling from your sleeping place."

That explained the crick in her neck. Raven's mouth felt like a strip of old tire tread after a long, long journey. She ate a segment of orange to try and remove the nasty taste, but grimaced at the combination of flavours.

"Would you favour some traditional Tamaranean schlorbek?" Starfire offered. "It was created to help preserve wakefulness in warriors between battles, and would not take long to prepare."

"What's in it?"

She listed several ingredients that sounded like the authors of Raven's oldest books. "Thanks but no thanks, Star," Raven declined politely. "I'll just make myself some toast." She made no move to get up.

Starfire shrugged. "If that is what would make you happy, friend Raven."

"Happy. Yeah. Right."

Starfire clutched her hands in her lap and bounced her feet against the bottom of the couch. She was never very good at hiding her emotions. She clearly wanted to ask something.

Raven sighed. "Spit it out, Star."

"My apologies. I was simply wondering … did you go into Terra's room?"

She froze. "Why?"

It took a moment for Star to answer. When she did, her voice was as subdued as Raven had ever heard it. The quiet restraint was so different from her usual exuberance that it was almost obscene. Or, at least, Raven thought so. Starfire was the perennial innocent. She was not supposed to be depressed or brooding.

"I often go into her room. It is … comforting."

"I thought Cyborg cut the motion sensor in her door - " Raven started, then stopped. "Oh. Your strength."

Starfire nodded. "I do not think Robin is aware I go in there. I do not think he would understand. I like it in Terra's room. It is a heartening place."

"Heartening?" Raven grunted. "If there's one thing Terra _wasn't_, it's heartening. I thought her room represented all the lies she told us – the person she never was."

"That may be so, but I like better to believe that it shows the person she would have liked to be." Star paused. "She left all her things in our home. She took none of them with her when she went with Slade. She did not even take the small coloured images humans like to put in albums. Did you know that she performed lawn-der-ee for her blankets and bed dresses on her last day with us?"

Raven thought for a moment, picking absently at bits of pith that had dried under her nails. "Bedclothes, Star. They're called bedclothes."

"Yes. Bedclothes."

"Starfire?"

"Hm?"

"How did you know it was me that went in there?"

Starfire's mouth quirked into a smile. "I did not until you told me."

* * *

Terra's room was just as she had left it. Had Starfire not all but told her she'd been in there, Raven never would have known anyone but herself had looked at these things since Robin shut the door and cut the power.

The alligator pencil was still on the floor. She picked it up, turned it around in her fingers, and then set it down on the sideboard.

She replaced it in her restless hands with a picture frame. The photo in it had been clipped from a newspaper – the first highly publicised mission Terra had been a part of. The Titans were stood next to the T-Car, waving to an appreciative crowd they'd just rescued from an onslaught of mutated plant life. Though not shown, Poison Ivy had been on a stretcher not far from them, being loaded into an ambulance that had taken her to a rendezvous point for the folk at Arkham Asylum to pick her up. She'd been after Robin as part of some harebrained scheme for payback for past events, but she'd underestimated the strength of his teammates.

Raven set the photo down and picked up another. This one was tiny and frameless, two of its four sides slightly jagged where scissors had chopped. It had been taken in a photo booth Starfire had crammed them into in an effort to emulate Earth culture. Terra was laughing, half squished between Cyborg's shoulder and Star's back, and looked completely at ease with herself.

The next picture was a glossy photo from a magazine, which showed Terra and Beast Boy eating ice-creams cones from the special vegan section of the ice-cream parlour. Raven had never tried ice-cram made from Soya-milk. There were leaves around the edges of the picture that hadn't quite been cut off, indicating permission for it to be taken had not been given by the subjects. This was emphasised by the look Terra was giving Beast Boy. It was a tender, somewhat sad glance, impossibly intimate and not meant to be splashed around for three dollars a pop at a newsstand. Raven remembered the article that had gone with that picture. Vicki Valentine had written it.

She set it down and reached for another frame, but paused before touching it. This one was a very old photo, creased horizontally and vertically, as if it had been folded and stuffed into a pocket for a long time. In it, a man with a beard balanced a little girl with wispy blonde hair on his shoulders. The little girl could not have been more than five years old, and a woman who could have been nobody but her mother looked up at her from the man's side. She had watery green eyes, but both the man's and the girl's were a matching shade of blue.

Raven stared at the snapshot for a long moment. Then, without touching it, she stepped backwards and waved her hand to open a portal.

* * *

Once, when Raven was out of town with Cyborg and Beast Boy, there was an explosion at a bread factory in Jump City. It wasn't anything to do with supervillains, but had rather been caused by human error and a leaky gas pipe. When more workers were trapped inside than the authorities could cope with, the remaining Titans staged a rescue from the burning, rapidly collapsing buildings. Robin came out of it with a mild concussion and some minor burns on his face and neck. Starfire came out of it with him in her arms. Terra, on the other hand, had a walkway fall on her while she was distracted. She never said what by. _She _came out of it with three hairline fractures in her left arm, crushed fingers, two snapped ribs, a cracked skull and a leg that was broken in six different places.

When Raven, Beast Boy and Cyborg got home she was in hospital. Of course, Beast Boy insisted they go there first instead of Titans Tower, and rushed up to her room as fast as the disapproving looks of the nurses would allow. Terra had her leg and arm in hoists and a strained expression on her face when Raven finally got to her room.

"Why didn't you call us?" Cyborg had asked. "Raven could've come back and healed you, girl."

But Terra had shaken her head, winced and said, "Comes with the territory, right? Besides, the staff here at the hospital are really cool. They've been taking terrific care of me. I'm like some kind of celebrity. I mean, have you _seen _how many flowers I got? That big one over there is from the nurses." Then she had grinned a decidedly lopsided grin and muttered, "Its weird. Usually I hate hospitals. I never get too close to them. Just in case."

"In case what?"

"Um – hey, you want some grapes? I got tons and I don't even eat them. Look, BB. Veggie food. Num-nums."

Beast Boy had smiled perhaps a little too widely and deadpanned "Ha ha" in a voice that could have been Raven's.

* * *

It was too much to hope Terra had kept a diary. Even her laptop was a little impersonal, full of downloaded music files, some funny pictures she'd saved from forwarded emails and an unused background or two. Robin had put it on a shelf in the evidence room.

Raven lifted it down and hesitated before switching it on. She found nothing more or less than Robin had. And why should she? He wasn't a master hacker, but Cyborg had also checked it out and he _was_.

So she went to the tower's main computer and searched, not really sure what she was looking for, but filled with an indefinable urge to … seek something out that looking at the photos in Terra's room had ignited in her.

The Titan mainframe proved a bust, giving up only Robin's detailed logs, which said a lot but revealed nothing she didn't already know. She widened her search to beyond their system, typed in 'Terra' and 'Teen Titan', and got back a mess of newspaper articles and message board conversations about Slade and the 'Jump Crisis'. Half of them lifted directly from each other, so she narrowed her search to results from before Terra jumped ship. What came back were mainly commentaries on how people thought she would do as a Titan, and how the hell was she eligible to even _be _one without prior public consent.

The public, or at least its vast majority, seemed to believe they owned the Titans. Perhaps it was because they were teenagers, or because they'd been relatively unproven heroes before forming this team. Whatever the reason, Terra had initially faced a lot of backlash for joining without 'consent'. It had taken a lot of work for her to gain their trust. Her burgeoning romance with Beast Boy – and the media's coverage of it – went a long way towards helping that. The public may be suspicious, but they're suckers for a good old romance story.

Raven's eyes were starting to drift shut when someone laid a hand on her shoulder. Without thinking, she whirled around, fist darkening; but it was just Cyborg.

"Seems every time I see you, you're catching some zees."

"Must be a hormone you secrete," she replied, letting her hand drop back to her side.

Instead of answering, he looked at the screen behind her and asked, "Looking for anything in particular?"

"No." She sat down in the uncomfortable plastic control chair. "Nothing at all."

Cyborg let her scroll and click aimlessly for a few seconds. Then he leaned over her shoulder, opened the tip of his finger and stuck it into a small port she hadn't even noticed was there. "I think _this _might be what you want."

A file flashed up. Cautiously, Raven clicked. It offered a choice of articles sorted by date. She picked the earliest and opened it.

'MYSTERIOUS EARTHQUAKE COSTS THOUSANDS OF TAXPAYERS' DOLLARS'

She scanned the text, felt her stomach tighten, and moved on to the next.

'INEXPLICABLE: SEISMIC ACTIVITY SINKS LOCAL PLAYGROUND'

'AN ACT OF GOD? LOCAL CHURCH SUGGESTS DIVINE INTERVENTION BEHIND RECENT CALAMITIES'

'NOT BUILT TO LAST: CITY MUSEUM FOUNDATIONS THE OBJECT OF MYSTERIOUS SUBSIDENCE'

The other articles went on in much the same vein, cataloguing a string of seemingly natural disasters across the country. Some were only weeks apart, others months. The connecting factor was small: experts had been baffled by the lack of warning before they happened. In most cases, the events didn't even follow the usual patterns afterwards, either: there were no aftershocks, no secondary quakes, nothing to suggest each incident had been more than a freak one-off occurrence. If you knew what you were looking for and had a map handy, you could just about see that the incidents formed a rough line in the direction of Jump City. Raven read with increasing unease, until she came to a report dated less than six months before Terra had arrived on their doorstep.

'TRAGEDY AMONG THE RUINS: LOCAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG SITE STRUCK BY EARTH TREMOR'

The newspaper the article came from was the Dakota Gazette. Dakota had its own heroes, and its own villains. One of their battles had claimed the front page that day. The news about a professor from the local university and his team of undergraduates had not been enough to merit more than a paragraph or two near the middle. The group had been investigating some previously unknown caves just outside the city when an unexpected tremor struck. Half had been caught in a cave in, and though rescuers soon arrived, three people had died down there.

Dakota was nowhere near a fault line.

_I didn't mean to it was an accident I didn't know what I was doing I was just trying to help honest I was I didn't mean for that to happen please you've got to believe me –_

"You knew about these?" Raven asked quietly.

"Not until afterwards," Cyborg replied.

"Does Robin know?"

He didn't answer.

"Why didn't you let us all in on this little detail? _These _little details."

"Would it have made any difference if I had?"

"People _died_." Raven realised one of her hands had become a fist. "Because of her. Terra. People _died_ because of her. She _killed _them. She - "

"She didn't kill them. Their deaths were accidental."

"How do we know that? How do we know she wasn't working for some _other _deranged psychopath who ordered them dead?"

"How do we know it _wasn't _the accident it looks like? I'm not making excuses for her." Cyborg was using a voice Raven had rarely heard before. It was the voice she predicted would be his regular one when he was a man and not a boy. "I'm just playing devil's advocate."

"So why did you hide these files behind encryption codes? Azar forgive me, Cyborg, this is the kind of digging we should have done _before _we let her join up. Terra may have seemed sweet and carefree and happy-go-lucky, but she _knew _about these things. She had to. Just look how she reacted when she thought it had got out – she ran away from us. It all fits, only we didn't have enough data on her to know it. She _knew _what her powers were capable of, but she told us nothing. Not even a sniff about how much destruction she'd caused before we took her in. How much pain and unhappiness. We must have seemed like such … such _patsies _to her – maximum comfort with minimum snooping."

Cyborg was silent.

"Answer me," Raven snapped.

"Answer what? What do you want me to say?"

"Just ... just tell me …"

"Tell you what, Raven? Why I didn't show you these files before? Why I think Terra didn't talk about all the nasty things in her past? Why we didn't poke around looking for dirt on her when she wanted to be a Titan?"

"Yes!"

"I never showed you the damn files because I knew you'd react this way."

"What way? You mean you thought I'd question the stupidity of our actions?"

His good eye flashed, and the red diode on the other side grew brighter. "Yeah, Raven. _Our _actions. You, me, and everyone else on this team. Face it – we _wanted _Terra to be a Titan. We _liked _the idea of having her on the team. Don't give me that look; you know it as well as I do. I saw you when y'all worked together to stop those worms from sinking the Tower. She may have fooled us into seeing something in her that wasn't there, or she may have just been looking for a new start. I don't know which, okay? I never got inside her head. That's why I went _looking _for all this info, so I could understand who the hell she was, because, frankly, I had no idea. I spent over six months of my life working with her, and I got nothing. No damn clue."

"And did this help?" Raven's tone was strained as a taut rubber band. She waved a hand at the computer screen. "Are you a Terra _expert _now?"

"No." Immediately, all the rising emotion drained from Cyborg's voice. He hung his head, and when he spoke again he was subdued. "No, I'm not. I think I understand more than I did, but … I just don't know, okay? Terra's … she _was_ a mystery. And don't go saying I'm using clichés to get out of answering. I read through every single damn file I could find about her. I called in every favour, talked to ever contact I have, just trying to figure out why she did what she did, how she could sucker us and then go back on Slade that way. I stayed up nights _just _trying to figure that out. And you know what?"

Raven wasn't sure she wanted to know. "What?"

He sighed. "There _ain't _no answer, Raven. Nobody knew Terra except Terra – and I'm not sure she totally knew herself, either. Look at this." He, too, gestured at the screen. "You notice something about these reports? She's never in them. Every time something bad happened, she ran away – got scared and moved on. I spoke to that Gear guy over in Dakota. He says he and Static ran into a girl matching Terra's description about a week before the cave-in on the dig. She helped them stop a massive fire threatening an entire city block, got some seriously injured people to hospital, then vanished before they even thanked her. She hung around juggling rocks and raising money for blankets outside a homeless shelter in Detroit, and worked for three weeks in a soup kitchen in Metropolis. She fished a baby out of the river in San Diego and got it to hospital so fast it survived where it wouldn't have otherwise. And believe me, finding out about _those _wasn't easy. So how could a girl like that, someone who seems like she only wants to use her powers to _help _people, turn into Slade's apprentice? Answer me that, Raven. C'mon, your turn. _You _answer _me _that."

Raven stared at her hands, unclenching her fists like the right words could be found in her unfurling fingers, her immaculate skin with its corpse-like grey tint, and the red stones on the back of her hands. She stared at her hands for a long time, remembering what it felt like to unleash her powers, and all the meditation it took to keep them from going out of control. There was no quick fix for something like that.

But she had been taught by the greatest minds Azar had to offer. Terra's powers had been foisted on her, and she had been expected to cope with no training, no detailed tuition, nothing to fall back on if things went bad. Nothing, that is, except the option to run away, try again somewhere else and hope that _this_ time would be different. Nobody had ever taught Terra about facing up to her problems. She had spent most of her life moving on, leaving when things got tough, or when disaster struck.

"Well?"

"I don't know either," Raven admitted, feeling the blood pound in her ears. She needed to meditate. Badly. "I've tried so hard … I've tried to understand what made her do the things she did. And I can't. I just _can't_. She's too big a contradiction. I want to hate her. I want … so desperately. I want her to be evil, so I can hate her. But I can see why she'd go to Slade if he promised he could give her full control of her powers. It may have been stupid, and selfish, and the laziest route she could take, but I can see _why_. And the fact that she _did _go to him makes me think that maybe – just maybe – she wasn't so bad after all. If she didn't want anything like this," she jabbed a finger at the Dakota Gazette article, "to happen again, then maybe she _wasn't _completely evil. But she did a lot of things to _us _that I'm not sure I can overlook. Starfire thinks Terra was good on the inside, that being with us changed her, but I just can't … I can't forget how she betrayed us, even if I can kind of understand why she did it. Some days I'd do anything to control my powers without having to work at it. But - " She stopped, biting the inside of her cheek and cursing herself for running off at the mouth. Being an intensely private person made it doubly disconcerting to let her own thoughts and feelings out in a lump of unprepared, uneven sentences.

Cyborg just looked at her. He sported a strange expression; as though he thought he'd been talking to someone called Raven, but had just discovered he was talking to someone called Fred.

"I need to go," Raven said hurriedly, rising from her chair.

"No, wait." He reached out to push her back into it.

_Oh god I did that all those people I'm sorry I can dig you out but what if I mess up again what if they die because of me oh god oh shit I didn't mean to I don't know what I'm doing why can't I do this why do I have these stupid powers if I can't control them oh god oh shit I can feel them under the rubble all those people oh oh oh shit WHY CAN'T I _**DO **_THIS –_

Raven spun on her heel, knocking his hand away. Her eyes burned with more than a hint of red.

Cyborg fell back like a kicked puppy.

She covered her face with both hands. "I … I need to meditate … I need to - " And she teleported away to the sanctity of her room.

* * *

Raven could never put it into words, but she had to believe that people were not born good or evil. Everything she was, everything she believed of herself depended on that.

Terra was both proof and disproof of this idea. She had caused so much pain and destruction, had quite literally bitten the hands that fed her, and gone on to wreak havoc and misery as far as she could under the satisfied eye of a madman.

But Terra had also done a lot of good things. She had stopped criminals, saved lives, tried to help people she didn't even know, and often been hurt in the process. She had special powers, but she wasn't invulnerable. The number of cuts, contusions, sprains and broken bones Raven had healed was incalculable. Terra had turned the Titans over to Slade, but she had risked everything by trying to get Beast Boy out of the firing line first. She had run away from her problems in every way imaginable, but she had paid a price for it. She had done wrong, and she had been punished.

Did that make her evil, or good? Or did it just make her human? She did good things for bad reasons, and bad things for good reasons. But did that even matter? The lines in everything she did were so blurred it was difficult to make out a real person in all the confusion.

Raven knew that she was, on some level, also doing good things for bad reasons. She knew of the potential for evil inside her own body – both literally and metaphorically. She knew that by working with the Titans she was affirming her own belief that people _could _defy their roots; that they could shape their lives according to something other than destiny. She was racking up 'good' points in the hope that some day, when she needed them, they would help see her through her own crises. Or at least impress upon people that she had _tried_.

Was that what Terra had been doing?

It was a puzzle that just kept twisting back on itself: a serpent intent on eating its own tail.

* * *

She stood on the edge of the hole, tiny bits of debris crumbling away under her feet. Five solid hours of meditation had led up to this point. Five solid hours of preparation that, in all honesty, was probably still not enough.

It had been three days since she blew up at Cyborg. She had avoided everyone since, reading more of the files Cy had downloaded onto disk and left outside her door for her to find. Robin and Starfire's matching expressions of worry had been nothing compared to her own sense of resolve. She had been gradually working herself up to this.

She took a step forward.

_Please don't make me go in there please please please please –_

Gritting her teeth, she muttered her favoured chant. "Azarath metrion zinthos. Azarath metrion zinthos…"

_Oh please oh God oh please don't make me I don't want to go back there he's in there I know he is he's waiting for me for us he's waiting for you too you can't make me us go in there you we can't make me you us go in there – _

Raven asserted her own dominance and leapt into the gaping mouth. She drifted vertically, passing outcroppings of rock that looked more and more melted the further she went.

She could hear crying in her head. It started small, like a child with a skinned knee, but the further she went the harsher it got, until loud, wrenching sobs reverberated around her skull. She told herself they weren't real. She focussed on her pulse points, on her chanting, on the way her body ticked from side to side with a rhythm that would have put a metronome to shame. But it was when she reached the bottom that the panic hit. She'd experienced panic – _real _panic – only a few times in her life. Real panic isn't just moist palms and a twitchy left eye. It's not panic that you've missed an exam, or you're going to be late, or you've mislaid some valuable family heirloom. No, real panic is the bowel-loosening, stomach-churning, cold sweat dread that overcomes you when you realise you've done something very, very stupid.

She should never have come down here.

Was that _her _thought? Really and truly hers?

Regardless, she had to stick to the plan. She forged ahead; walking the same path the Titans had taken to lay flowers and a plaque some months before. It was semi-familiar, at least enough that she made only one wrong-turn that turned her around so she was heading back towards the exit.

She was so intent on concentrating where she was going, that when the bang came she was on her stomach before she had time to think about _thinking _about forming a coherent thought.

Oh. Right. Reflexes. Yeah, she still had those, didn't she?

"Whoever just shot at me," she called, pushing herself onto her hands and knees, "has until the count of three to show themselves before I find them myself and - " She left the threat hanging.

There was a whimper from the shadows to her left. A body was thrust into view – a small boy, no more than ten or eleven, holding a revolver in trembling hands. The barrel smoked, but his grip was all wrong, indicating he wasn't the one who'd fired it. "This is our patch," he said in a wobbly voice.

Raven stood up and dusted herself off. "This is nobody's patch."

Whispers from the peanut gallery. "Is so!" the boy told her. "We got it fair and square."

"You can tell whoever's back there to show themselves. I'm not in the mood to play games. Not tonight."

The trembly boy's eyes widened. He leaned back a little and hissed, "Tony. Tony, she knows you guys are - "

"I know! I heard her, dickweed."

"Don't call him that!"

Three figures joined the first, all taller, lankier, and – most importantly – older. The eldest was still only pushing nineteen, though – twenty at most. He stepped forward, shoulder back. Raven guessed he was Tony.

"What do you want, Titan? I knew it was just a matter of time before you guys stopped ignoring us. What, we put a crimp in your brooding? We get in the way of the proper depressing mood? Well, guess what? Tough shit. Gonna beat on us, too, now?"

Raven scowled at him. He at least had the sense to look cowed. He was wearing a threadbare denim ensemble, sleeves thick with old grime and green lichen from higher up the walls. His face had the pinched look of someone not used to getting enough sleep or food, and his skin had a yellowish tint to it.

"You live down here?" she asked.

"Dogs piss up brick walls? You know we do."

"You give yourselves too much credit. Until you shot at me I had no idea anyone came near here. And since I don't like being shot at, I'm going to forgo small talk and ask what you're doing with firearms in the first place. I'll bet not one of you has a licence."

Tony sniffed, tilting his head so she could see right up his nostrils. "How much you willing to bet?"

She caught a flash of a man with a paunch held in by a string vest, clutching a bottle of Budweiser, face lit by the flickery blue of a television screen. "You took your father's gun, but you couldn't find the licence papers. You were just running without a plan and thought it might come in useful. And he loves that thing. It would pay him back for all the stuff he'd put you through." Her face twisted into a grimace at the wild thoughts and memories he unwittingly flung into the ether at what she was saying.

Tony's eyes had widened and his nostrils had flared, but he retained a defiant posture. "Lucky guess," he spat.

One of the other two taller figures was obviously a girl. The other had a face that maintained a perfect balance between male and female. This one leaned sideways, as if trying to bolster Tony's claims with physical presence as well as words. "Leave it out," said a voice that could have been female, or that of a boy still in the throes of puberty. "We aren't doing any harm."

"How do I know that?" Raven demanded, remembering Daniel the drug-runner.

"We just needed a place to crash," said the obvious girl. She was the tallest, and thin, with a handlebar eyebrow that showed no evidence of being plucked recently. In her black clothes she looked like a stick of liquorice. She held the small boy close to her front, hands dangling over his shoulders like a mother or older sister. "We weren't bothering nobody." Raven picked up on the protective aura around her. It reminded her of lavender, soft arms, the smell of soap; and it made her want to sneeze.

Liquorice Girl and the little boy were both pasty with fair hair, supporting the idea they were related. Tony's moth-eaten brown mop and the androgynous teen's red bangs and freckles were a stark contrast. Despite the freckles, not one of them looked like they got enough sunlight.

"I'll ask again: is this where you live? Crashing somewhere and living there are different things."

Tony frowned. "We crash here," he said grudgingly. "But what do you care?"

She sighed tightly. "You're not familiar with this whole hero thing, are you? Look, there's a shelter on Wychberry Avenue you can go to. It's a good place – better than the 'help' some peddle. They have food and medical equipment, they don't ask too many questions, and they can give you better shelter than this cave."

Tony snorted. "Why go up there? Here's where we're at now."

Raven gritted her teeth, notoriously thin patience almost worn through by a combination of irritation, weariness and reluctant concern. "This can't be as good as a warm, safe refuge with hot food and blankets in it."

"How do you know we ain't got that stuff stashed here?"

"I could find out." She tapped the side of her head, trying to ignore the way the little boy's grip on Liquorice Girl's hand tightened, and the way the fear around him flared like a white cape. Sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind. You did.

"Don't that violate the hero code of ethics?" Androgynous asked.

A burst of harsh laughter exploded, unintended, from Raven's throat. "Is that what you think? I've got news for you; heroism doesn't come with a handbook. Though life would be a lot easier if it did."

Her laughter seemed to have fazed them more than her anger. Uncertainty swirled like smoke around all four of them.

"What are you hiding from?" she asked, surprising even herself. "What's are you running from that's so bad it forced you down into this fleapit?" Her mind was already cataloguing the possibilities – abusive family, poverty, drug related problems, being just plain thrown out, and so on and so forth. She never even considered the possibility any of them had just wanted out of their normal lives. Seeking adventure on streets soaked with urine and despair was not how she pictured anyone wanting to live, let alone moving into a draughty cave for a change of scenery.

Tony narrowed his eyes, laying a possessive hand on Liquorice Girl's upper arm and drawing both her and the small boy to stand further behind him. "Fuck off."

"Very manly of you. Is that why you gave _him_," Raven indicated to the small boy, "_your _stolen gun after _you'd _fired it on someone?"

"Fuck you."

Tiny black flames danced along Raven's skin. She raised her left fist to properly display them. "Curse at me again and I might not be able to hold these back," she said quietly. "I've made no move against you. All I did was suggest you go to a shelter instead of stay out here. If you're as in charge as you appear, then you should know the welfare of your little group comes before pride."

"If we leave our patch, we lose it."

"What patch? These stinking caves?"

"It's a good patch."

"It's ours," Androgynous put in, as if this would swing the debate.

Raven tilted her face down but kept her eyes on them, so that she looked up through her lashes. It was a menacing look to the uninitiated, a mild threat to those who knew better.

"Rosie," the little boy suddenly said, turning to bury his nose in Liquorice Girl's stomach. "I don't want to go back out there. He'll find us."

"No, he won't," she replied, stroking his hair with fingers so tense they looked like claws.

Raven had to pull her mind back from the flurry of anxiety and fear the kid threw off. He was the psychic equivalent of a large-print book. She counted to ten and raised her face. "If you stay," she said evenly, "you're in danger. The ground above here isn't stable, and it's getting even less secure every day."

"So we'll move along to another cave."

"You'll be sealed in."

"Says you."

"Yes. Says me. I also say that going to one of the shelters is your best option."

"We can't." Liquorice Girl bit her lip and shook her head. "We're …" She hesitated, then blurted, "We're minors. If we go somewhere official, they'll send us back home. It's the law."

Raven couldn't argue with that. So instead, she asked, "Why don't you want to go home?"

"None of your beeswax." Tony thrust himself between them, tossing his head like some tupping ram ready to clash horns with a young upstart.

Raven caught the ghostly afterimage of a cold bathroom floor, warm tears and an ache just below her belly. She wanted to shudder, but all she could do was mentally repeat her mantra to keep her fury at their entire situation in check. At once, she saw herself as they must have seen her – an interloper, someone who couldn't possibly understand their need to stay hidden, even if it meant courting death among this wreckage. She compared her freshly washed cloak, dampened only slightly by her surroundings and her own sweat, to their dirty clothes; her full belly to their aching hollows. And she felt their resentment of her, coming down here and preaching to them when she knew nothing – nothing! – about their situation beyond what she saw on first glance.

She swallowed, hard, and tried to think of something to say. Suddenly she wished she were more like Starfire, who didn't need to plan speeches. Star just opened her mouth and words poured out, like a water balloon with a puncture in the side. Sometimes they were ridiculous, other times they were profound, but you always _knew _that whatever she said, it was what she really believed right then. It never felt like a lecture when Star spoke, never descended into soapbox sermon, or daytime-soap moralising. Every word from her lips felt honest and true. And damn Azar's eyes, but Raven wished for a bit of her brand of frankness, which never sacrificed sincerity for etiquette.

Liquorice Girl's eyes grew round. "Oh, god …"

"What?" Tony looked at her. "_What?_"

"She knows," she replied, not taking her eyes from Raven. "Oh god. She _knows_."

"Yeah?" Tony rounded again, hackles rising. "What's that mean to you, Titan? Feel sorry for us, now? Gonna kiss our boo-boos all better?" He wanted to spit on the floor, she could tell.

As a contrast to their collective fear and anger, Androgynous was surprisingly calm. Raven glanced at him/her and felt like asking, "So what's your excuse?" just to round out the set of sob stories.

"I tried to jump off a roof," he/she said, as if their psychic roles were reversed, and then shrugged. "The look on your face said you wanted to know. My mom tried to straighten me out, but I was a square peg, y'know? Bathtub of warm water and a razor blade. Then a noose, but the neighbour's dog started barking and they cut me down again. Wandered out into traffic once. Didn't work, either, but nearly gave her a heart attack. So I got out of her life and took my fucked-uppishness with me. Better for all concerned. It's weird on the street. Calmer. Everyone fighting to survive. Seems a bit pointless trying to off yourself in the middle of all that. Better to keep going so you can help someone else survive – someone who really wants to. Haven't tried anything since hooking up with these guys." He/she said all this so coolly it might have been nothing more than answering a plea for directions to the nearest restroom.

They were all broken; the ruined detriment of a society that'd gone wrong but refused to accept it. Jump City was so shiny and neat and new. It was easy to forget that new was only defined by old, wealth by poverty. It was easy to forget the dark corners, where secrets played out like a Greek tragedy until an EMS truck came to clear up at the end. Raven had spent so many nights wandering places like that. She may even have passed under the windows of homes like theirs – _their _very homes, maybe. Who was to say the woman hovering over the telephone wasn't one of their mothers? What was stopping the baby crying in its crib from being their brother, sister, child? The worn man asleep in his chair, the dipso staggering from the fridge to the toilet, the mousy guy who's the luckiest in his block because his job affords him a pension plan, even if his boss belittles him every day. Only the limitations of her own acceptance failed to recognise those little montages as more than fragments of a dreary whole she'd been immersing herself in to anaesthetise everything else. But it was different to confront it like this: with warm, yielding flesh and dispirited eyes. It made everything seem more … real. Less like a sad piece of poetry, or a miserable song on the jukebox of a 24-hour Starbucks at three in the morning.

"If you're being abused," she said, the vowels slippy and the consonants too sharp, "then they won't make you go back to whoever was doing it."

"Nobody believed us before," Liquorice Girl said. Tony tightened his grip on her arm, his own bent at an odd angle to keep her behind him.

"I'll vouch for you this time," Raven assured her.

"You weren't even there."

"The police have made cases based on my kind of evidence before."

Liquorice Girl looked a little taken aback. "Really? Wait – no. No, we can't go into care. If we do, they'll separate us. I'm not letting Henry go to some stranger's house without me."

"They can make special arrangements to keep families together, you know."

"What about Tony and Wim? They're too old to go into care. What about them?"

"The idea of the shelter still stands. It's a temporary fix-up. And you could always go on a waiting list for a hostel. A firm address makes it easier to get a job. And a job means no more of this scraping around in the dirt."

Liquorice Girl looked half convinced. Desperation swam beneath the surface of her hope, which shone a brightening yellow. The little boy, now renamed Henry, kept his face pressed against her belly like she was his mother and he was trying to force his way back into the comfortable security of the womb.

Tony spat on the floor. "Load of crap. It's never that easy for people like us. Nobody wants to give us a chance."

Androgynous – no, Wim, for all the indication of gender that name gave – folded his/her arms and seemed a little bored. His/her eyes wandered, a slightly frenetic edge to the way they ticked from one sharp rock to another.

"I don't want him to find us again," Henry mumbled. It was obvious he was crying. "Please, Rosie, don't let him find us. You _promised_. You pinkie-swore it!"

_Don't let him find me don't let him get me please don't let him get me he's here he's waiting for me this is where I killed him but he's not dead he's not he's really not do you hear me HE'S NOT DEAD –_

Raven clapped her hands over her ears. A funnel of black energy sprang up around her, widening.

"What the fuck?" she heard Tony shout. "What're you _doing_?"

She didn't have to visualise the plain grey foyer of the homeless shelter on Wychberry Avenue. She'd seen the doors opening onto it so many times, when she watched from the shadows on her nighttime rounds, that it was as easy as teleporting herself back to her own room at Titans Tower. The faces of three volunteers stared, surprised, at the dramatic entrance.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Wim gritted, looking a bit green. Teleporting had that effect on some people.

"Oh no," Liquorice Girl murmured, holding the little boy close. "No. We're not ready – I didn't agree yet. No, no, no, no - "

"You bitch!" Tony snatched at the gun, dangling from Henry's hand, but a combination of queasiness and Raven's telekinesis made him miss. She crunched the barrel to a mess of twisted metal with a thought, and then drew it into her own hands to keep it from his reach. "You sanctimonious bitch!" he shouted again, all but throwing himself at her. "Just because you're not a normal person, you think you know what's best for us? You fucking _bitch_! You don't know anything _about _us! You don't. Know. _Anything_!"

_I'm **not **some little girl who needs saving –_

Raven turned her back on them all and ran into a portal. This time she didn't walk any part of the way underground. There was no point in mentally preparing anymore, so she just sent herself directly into the chamber Slade had made his base of operations after they destroyed his first headquarters in the clock tower. Walls of cooled molten rock knifed up around her, surrounding a large space punctuated by several grotesque propulsions of stone. The place had a museum-like feel to it – open plan but dusty.

And in the very middle, as if planned by some disturbed architect, was Terra's statue, head thrown back and arms wide, as if eternally asking to be pardoned by some unseen god.

Raven skidded out of the portal right in front of the plaque she'd helped lay. She looked up at the statue, narrowed her eyes, drew back her arm and threw the crumpled gun at it.

"I can't _take_ it anymore! I can't figure it out on my own! The world is messed up, okay? I admit it. It's. Messed. Up. And I can't fix it on my own. I can't even fix little pieces of it. Are you happy? I don't understand enough to _do _anything about it. I've never completely understood. And I never would have had to realise that before _you_ came into our lives!" She took a deep breath, feeling the next words pulling themselves free from inside her. I hate you. That was what she wanted to say. In that reckless moment, with her head throbbing and the memory of Henry's crying fresh in her mind, she wanted to purge herself of that sentence.

Only she never got the chance.

"Raven?"

Instead of forming words, her lungs contracted and she let out a whoosh of empty carbon dioxide that made her lips tingle.

The voice had the echoey quality that always happens in caves and large rooms, but it was easy to locate the source of it – not least of all because Beast Boy was peeking out from behind the statue. His eyes were overlarge and a little startled at her sudden entrance – not to mention her unprecedented hullabaloo – and his hair stood on end like a cat disturbed from a really good nap. He had obviously not been expecting her. And why would he? She hadn't really been expecting herself.

"Beast Boy," was all she could murmur, clamping down, vice-like, on herself. Her cape fell forward as if of its own accord, cupping the fronts of her shoulders, edges meeting in the middle. Behind her back, one hand found the other wrist. "What are - " She stopped. The awkwardness of the moment prevented her asking what he was doing there. How could she quiz _him_ when she wasn't even sure what she was doing there herself?

Beast Boy pulled himself to his feet and scooched around the side of the statue. There was something almost intimate about how close he got to the scratchy grey bandages, the granite fingertips and the atrophied thighs. Raven thought the thing equal parts mesmerising and grotesque. She found herself looking down, away from baleful eyes that weren't even pointed at her. Terra stared sightlessly at the ceiling of the cave, which was unnaturally concave and even, as though a giant bubble had pressed against it and forced it into its current shape. Even the stalactites were squashed, like half melted candles on a birthday cake. Here and there were tiny apertures, no more than pinholes really, which let in barely enough to see by. Were her natural element not darkness, Raven would have had trouble seeing at all. She assumed Beast Boy's unique genes allowed him the same sort of ability, because he didn't seem to be having any problems.

Well, not with seeing the dark, at least.

"Are the others with you?" he asked, half-sitting on Terra's feet and easing his legs onto Raven's lower patch of ground.

"No."

"Oh." He paused. "I just thought this might be some kind of intervention, y'know?" He didn't sound entirely upset at the prospect.

Raven was glad her hood was up. "You come down here a lot?" Was that her voice? It sounded so calm, so rational, like she hadn't just been using it to scream obscenities at a modern day pillar of salt.

"Yeah."

"I see."

There was a pause.

"So … you didn't come down here to find me?"

She breathed: in, out, in, out, both rhythmic and rigid.

"Only," Beast Boy went on, "I kind of overheard Robin talking about how he didn't think it was healthy for me to come down here so much. So I figured, when you arrived …" He flushed. "That's actually really stupid, isn't it? Thinking you were here to find me when you were talking to her."

Raven chose her words carefully. "I don't think … _talking_ is the best word to describe it."

For a moment he looked puzzled. Then a wan smile tugged at his mouth. "Yeah. I guess."

There was another long pause in which neither of them moved. Time seemed to slow down, ignoring its own rules and stretching a few seconds into hours. And Raven knew with unwelcome certainty that until the end of her days, she would have the image indelibly imprinted on her brain of that impossibly skinny green figure, looking at the floor like it held the answers to the meaning of life. The distance between them was about six feet, if that, but it might as well have been a hundred miles.

A tiny sound perforated the air. Raven realised it was a humourless laugh, and it hadn't come from her.

"Nobody ever said this would be easy, did they?" Beast Boy asked. "This whole being a superhero thing."

"Not that I heard."

"Good. Because it isn't." He sat back down on Terra's feet and turned his head to rest one cheek on his fist. His eyes slid sideways so that he looked up at her past the tip of his own left ear. "I yell at her too, sometimes."

Raven grimaced, but her hood swallowed it.

"Aren't you gonna ask why?"

"I assumed that you'd tell me if you wanted me to know."

"I do. I think. I don't know. I already talked to Starfire about some stuff but – y'know." His gaze flicked between her face and Terra's, though for all the movement they showed they might have been the same.

They volleyed another silence, in which Beast Boy seemed to be making a decision. "Thanks, Raven," he said at last.

Raven wasn't sure how much of her surprise showed. "For what? I haven't done anything."

"Exactly. Ever since it happened, the rest of the guys can't stop trying to … to _fix_ me."

She shrugged much more callously than she felt. "You're not the first person life ever trampled on."

"I know. I've cleared a couple of fights out of her before. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time here – keeping it safe. Sometimes I felt real bad about doing it, though. It's different than fighting bad guys like HIVE, or Mumbo, or …" He paused. They both knew full well which name came at the top of the List of Enemies. "I yell at her for a bunch of stuff. But it's weird, because I hardly ever talk to her about Slade, or why she did what she did. I tell her about what we've been doing, or the people I saw on my way over, or the weather. Can you believe that? I come all the way down here just to sit on her feet and tell her it's raining. Except … I couldn't sit on her feet at first. I didn't even want to touch her. She was all … cold." He closed his eyes. "Aw man, I can't believe I'm telling you this. I sound so dumb and pathetic."

She couldn't believe he was telling her, either. In the time since their final battle with Terra, Raven had talked to Beast Boy maybe a handful of times outside missions. This marked the longest conversation they'd had since they met up under Titans Tower to plot her takedown, and Raven had seen the awful hurt and desire for vengeance in eyes that had since become vague and distant.

"You know something?" he said suddenly. "At the end … she was really scared. I mean like, majorly scared. But not of staying behind. When she beat Slade and triggered the volcano, she fell on me. I thought she was standing up to run with us, but she – I told her it was too late. I wanted her to come with us. And she was more frightened of _that_ than turning into … this." He gestured at the statue. "I knew you could've teleported us away. Or Star could've flown us. Terra could've fixed this from the outside. She didn't _have _to be in here to do it. But she wanted to, because she was afraid. After everything, she was more afraid of us, and how we'd react to her, than she was of …" he swallowed " … of dying."

The burden of the word hung in air like pea-soup fog. Nobody had said it out loud before.

At first, Raven was surprised to hear these words from Beast Boy. He had been the one who believed in Terra more than anybody. He had connected with her, fought for her, taken stupid risks for her, and they had left marks in each other that were deeper than any physical wounds. To hear him talk of her now, to acknowledge one of her faults with neither vengeance nor defence in his voice was … peculiar. A little sobering. But Raven curbed her reaction. Between her sporadic glimpses of him he had been continuously living, thinking, developing in ways she couldn't imagine. It was ridiculous to think that he had existed in some sort of stasis outside what she saw and heard – the suspended animation of the grieving.

And yet …

And yet there was a whiff of reprieve from him: of liberation, as if he had been waiting for someone to stop still, to stop helping and planning on helping him and just _listen_ to him. The fact that it was she who'd ended up in the role was both gratifying and supremely ironic. She felt needed in a way she never had before – not as a heroine, not as a healer, not even as a friend, but simply as a person.

It was at that moment, caught in introspection, that she realised … the crying in her head had stopped.

She blinked.

She blinked again.

"Beast Boy…"

"Hm?" He looked up, interrupted from his thoughts.

She was suddenly struck by a memory of seeing him and Terra standing on the jetty, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut and looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched. She remembered how Terra always drank her coffee black; how whenever she sneezed she always sneezed at least three times in a row, and how the top and bottom of her pyjamas never matched. She remembered how much she liked spicy chilli, how her eyes lit up when they came within thirty metres of that toy store with the free skiing arcade game, and how she always made little grunty noises when she was confused. Raven remembered a thousand little facts, a million tiny details that had somehow got lost in the confusion and pain and ill-defined nature of her last moments with them – millions of little insignificant details that belonged to Terra and Terra alone.

_The name's Terra nice to meet you –_

Raven reached up, pulled her hood away from her face and looked at him, willing him to understand.

Beast Boy stared right back at her.

The pause and sculpture of the moment was precious.

" … Raven?" he said, all possible questions in the word.

"I came down here to see if it really was her I was hearing," she said quietly, minimally, taking a deliberate step towards him. "But it's not. It's more of an … an echo. An imprint of her mind – her memories that I picked up at the end. I wanted to understand her. I wanted to know the whys and whats and wheres. I was terrified of what having her with me might mean. But even though I could hear the things she'd thought, the things she'd seen, I couldn't make myself understand her any better. She's just turned from a little mystery into a big one. And I worried that if I tried to understand _how _she was here, with me, I'd drive her away – make sure we lost her again. Except that I've always been too late to stop us losing her. I spent so much time trying to figure everything else out so I wouldn't have to deal with it. But it doesn't go away." She kept her eyes trained on his face. "_It _never does."

He swallowed visibly as she got closer. "You mean - "

They never got to finish their kiss on the Ferris Wheel. Strange that in the face of everything Raven knew about her, _that_ was one of Terra's biggest regrets. Strange … and yet perfectly credible.

"Do you trust me?" She held out her hand just _so_.

"Oh - " He didn't finish the sentence, stumbling to his feet and all but falling into her arms the same way Terra had fallen into his.

Raven propped him up, felt his shoulders begin to shake. And she stood there; the world's most bizarre and possibly most poorly cast emotional lynchpin. He was like something broken, and since she wasn't in the greatest of shape herself, she didn't know how to put him back together.

But that didn't matter. She realised that now. Some things weren't meant to be understood, just like some things weren't meant to be fixed by someone else. There was no such thing as a quick fix. Everything was always more complicated than it first appeared. And all that mattered right that moment was the moment itself: the feel of Beast Boy's grief finally finding an outlet that wasn't made of stone or aimless wandering.

Raven didn't bother stroking his head or plying him with meaningless palliatives. She didn't murmur, "I'm here," or "It'll be okay," because she _couldn't _guarantee that everything would be okay. She couldn't promise that what had happened with Terra was the worst of the challenges they would ever have to face. Standing there in the near-dark, or back at the Tower with their friends, they were on journeys bound for rapture and heartache, warm company and cold loneliness, satisfaction, biting regret, sunrises, sunsets, humid nights, rainy days, battles they couldn't win, but which they fought anyway, victories, failures, moments of pure joy, unhappiness only dimly perceived – bound, in other words, for life.

Outsiders had no right to refer to Terra as 'the damaged Titan.' Reporters like Vicki Valentine had no right calling her 'the traitor,' or 'the failed one', because they hadn't earned their shorthand through a long distillation of firsthand knowledge. For the first time ever, Raven empathised rather than sympathised with the likes of Tony, Rosie, Wim, Henry, Daniel – and everyone else she'd met on her travels. She saw how wildly their sphere of influence was misinterpreted by those in no position to know what the hell was going on.

"Raven," said Beast Boy. She'd had no idea her name could mean so many things.

"We should get out of here."

"I – yeah. Yeah, you're right." He disentangled himself from her, looking a little abashed.

Since she'd done no more than slip a hand under his armpit, she just let it drop to her side and was detached from the awkward embrace.

"Could you … could we go through a portal?"

One eyebrow rose of its own accord. "I thought you hated teleporting."

"I do."

She gave it a moment, and then nodded. When he'd pulled himself upright and scrubbed his face onto his sleeve, she turned slightly, motioning with the direction of her body.

"Ready to go?"

"As I'll ever be."

A small, sad smile found her lips. "Me neither."

* * *

Terra's room was still unchanged. Raven considered asking Star how she was capable of so much accidental destruction, but managed to barely move the dust when she came in here.

Outside, the moon was waxing. The sky was cloudless, the air sharp and clear.

Raven turned down the bed, with its never-slept-in sheets. She pressed one experimental hand into the pillow, felt her fingers sink into synthetic fibres that resumed their shape the moment she let go. She looked around the room, not expecting anyone to emerge from the shadows, and then she climbed in.

She hadn't bothered with a light. Her cloak hung on the wicker chair Terra had rescued from a wood chipper less than a week after coming back. The stuffed animal collection was wrapped in it.

As Raven let her head fall like a cannonball onto the pillow, she let out a very small sigh. She could feel sleep bearing down on her eyelids, and she allowed it to claim her senses, enveloping them in silence. It was both disturbing and a relief to realise she was human after all.

The world was indeed messed up.

But they would be messed up together.

* * *

FINIS.

* * *

_Hello darkness, my old friend,  
I've come to talk with you again,  
Because a vision softly creeping  
Left its seeds while I was sleeping;  
And the vision that was planted in my brain  
Still remains  
Within the sound of silence. _

In restless dreams I walked alone  
Narrow streets of cobblestone  
'Neath the halo of a street lamp  
I turned my collar to the cold and damp  
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light  
That split the night  
And touched the sound of silence

_And in the naked light I saw  
Ten thousand people, maybe more.  
People talking without speaking.  
People hearing without listening.  
People writing songs that voices never share,  
And no one dared  
Disturb the sound of silence _

"Fools", said I, "You do not know  
Silence like a cancer grows.  
Hear my words that I might teach you;  
Take my arms that I might reach you."  
But my words, like silent raindrops fell  
And echoed  
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed  
To the neon god they made.  
And the sign flashed out its warning  
In the words that it was forming;  
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls  
And tenement halls!"  
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

_**-The Sound of Silence **_by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.

* * *

**Last Note –** This fic could, potentially, be taken as existing in the same continuity as my other post-Terra fic _Learning to Breathe_. However, it's not imperative to read both, and they could equally exist outside of each other, as self-contained stories. Just letting you know about the connection in case you want to check out the other one, or you were wondering what the hell the other characters were up to while Raven was doing what she was doing over here.

* * *

**FEEDBACK APPRECIATED, PEOPLE! REVIEWS ARE GOLDEN NUGGETS OF HAPPINESS FOR A WRITER!**


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